The songs i sing when the world yells disaster

latifa sekarini

After John Ashbery

Sound just like the stubborn moon in Scorpio, the Monday morning

Horoscope that proclaims “You will miss your bus.” Wake up to

A medicine cabinet that ran away from the antacids. Or household ruckus.

Friends bickering over gibbous truths. Honeycombed minutes

Escort you toward unbearable canyons. For the longest time, you hoped

The times were kind to you. You forget how tenacity blooms in

Cities. How inquisitive hands in the plaza hands you wholeness.

How betrayal comes in bejeweled honesty, how I am both

The crimson in your cheeks and the salmon in your nail beds,

The skeletons in your closet and the noon-lit bathroom sink

Where mortification meets a mirror. Exhaustion offers itself

To you in the most loving manner. And what do you wish for?

You wish for it to hit you harder, to never fissure into kindness.

Is it “blasphemous” if this is all our lighthouse lives are meant to play?

Make a hobby out of believing. But endearing relief costs more than

the modified pain of a treacherous bone. And the city

Shatters before its music plays on. Is this an ending that

The world can dance to? One cannot wait

For their ribs to learn how to upstage the quiet out of them.

For the skeletons in our closet are craving

Again, and again, those unbearable canyons.